Alternate title: Foucault, Said, Marx and I hold hands

    I find myself in an interesting intellectual moment, an octagonal intersection in which every direction pushes and pulls yielding both pauses and openness. As my two classes, themselves dense intersections of various concerns, begin to overlap and fight for primacy––I hope neither will win––the text before me is opening, constantly unfolding, refusing for the clean closure of a given ‘reading’. Although his essay “The emancipation of the West Indies” first allowed for a meta awareness of this condition, the moment’s text is English Traits.

As soon as this land, thus geographically posted, got a hardy people into it, they could not help becoming the sailors and factors of the globe. From childhood, they dabbed in water, they swam like fishes, their playthings were boats. In the case of the ship-money, the judges delivered it for law, that “England being an island, the very midland shires therein are all to be accounted maritime”; and Fuller adds, “the genius even of landlocked countries driving the natives with a maritime dexterity.” As early as the conquest, it is remarked, in explanation of the wealth of England, that its merchants trade to all countries.
    The excerpt was chosen for its brevity, but illustrates well the numerous strands that knot themselves in this thick account. First, positing England generally and London specifically as a geographic ‘center’, despite Emerson’s own extended discussion of previous imperial capitals doing the same, evinces a naturalizing logic that intertwines, paradoxically, with a self reflexive awareness of the relativity of ‘centers.’ This naturalizing logic extends to remove agency from the ‘hardy people’ by inscribing them into a geographic determinism (“they could not help becoming sailors”) that undoes itself by requiring hardiness.
     Evidence of this natural hardiness, however, does not come merely from Emerson’s own observations but is the inevitable conclusion of the historical events, invasions-migrations, given in a section just preceding the given excerpt. The present conditions (its ontology understood broadly) are the expected conclusion of a teleological narrative, which is deployed by Emerson to give him discursive authority, power based on wielding accepted knowledge. Moreover, the sea industries are transformed into being “maritime” by a juridical proclamation which, because it follows the naturalizing logic described above, allows for the smooth slippage between geographic determinism and constructed legal claims. A similar logic frames Emerson’s deployment of Fuller’s statement, which, like the previous citation, has the pressure and authority of a ‘native informant.’ That is, both Fuller and ‘the judges’ are invoked in a citationary system that lends, simultaneously, discursive authority and ‘authenticity.’ Interestingly, Said’s concept is both reinforced and troubled by Emerson’s use of these sources because they are ‘native’ to rather than travelers through the space, but ultimately Englishmen, a discursive source already accredited.
    The strategic deployment of discursive authorities to uphold a naturalizing logic of geographic determinism also subsumes English commercial success in its teleological narrative. Emerson’s notes the fading of “English manners,” elegance and nobility the further he ventures from London to the industrial spaces of Manchester and Liverpool. Despite this, the given paragraph is blind to the drastic disparities between industrial, agricultural, mercantile laborers and the landed aristocracy because it sees through the violent lens of the singular ‘English wealth.’ Moreover, the laborers are also infantilized as the physically enlarged versions of the children who “dabbled in water…swam like fishes…[and whose] playthings were boats.” They are and always have been such. Given this, laboring child-men can be tied to the “ship-money” by law simply because they are not doing maritime work but are being maritime, which is simply understood as being English.
    Finally, only because my energy is wearing, Emerson’s paragraph constructs a theory of time that, to misuse Derrida, is “always already.” In addition to the naturalizing discourse already analyzed, the paragraph’s form performs its theory of temporality with opening and closing sentences that privilege “the conquest” by “hardy people.” English-ness and English history began their earthly incarnation in that moment; time, like the middle of the paragraph, functions only to reveal and reinforce ever present, unchanging, unchanged English traits.